Past Events

Join us for the opening reception of this sound art exhibition featuring work by Autumn Chacon, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Melissa General and Suzanne Morrissette; curated by Lisa Myers. It will feature a performance at 7pm by Jeneen Frei Njootli – who turns an ear to materials, such as caribou antlers, to sound the transmission of embedded and layered ancestral knowledge. The performance will be live broadcast on NAISA radio as part of Art’s Birthday celebrations (http://naisa.ca/naisa-radio/), with broadcast host, Cole Forrest Stevens. “wnoondwaamin | we hear them” calls for the occupation of sound waves, exploring the capacity of these energies to access knowledge and memory. The exhibition itself will be showing through to the closing reception at the Downtown Gallery Hop: Friday March 3, 7-9:30pm wnoondwaamin | we hear them is organized and circulated by Trinity Square Video with the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
Exhibition webpage:http://whitewatergallery.com/programming/wnoondwaamin-we-hear-them/
Curatorial Talk:http://whitewatergallery.com/programming/events-2016/curatorial-talk-lisa-myers/

Ideal Bounds imagines a hypothetical near-future wherein the world’s bees have perished due to human causes. This wry, dystopian musing combines the signifiers one finds in present-day museum exhibits with the playfulness of stop motion animation to build an uncanny fiction. This seven minute short imagines a futuristic beehive whose heart has been infected with a technological virus. Cyborg workers attempt to make repairs but are gradually overcome by their mechanical impairments.

Q&A with Filmmaker, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a member of the Kainai Nation (Blood Reserve, Blackfoot Confederacy) and Sámi from Norway, is a writer, director, producer, and actor. Her award-winning works – often rooted in social justice – explore innovative means of telling stories. She is an alumni of the University of British Columbia’s First Nations Studies Program (now FNIS). She was presented with the 2014 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award as an emerging artist in film and new media and was included in CBC’s list of “Indigenous Youth Leaders: 5 Under 30 to Watch in 2015.”

The Deep Dark is a series of site-specific light installations intended to illuminate the interspaces between our sacred (and natural) environments and cultural constructs of darkness.
Meditative, iconic, and evocative, Crossing will invite each viewer to participate in a 1500 ft solo night hike across the frozen lake, alone in communion with the water, voices in the ice, and their own thoughts. As viewers pass through the nighttime gates, the brightness of the passage will temporarily overwhelm their vision, night-blinding them. The installation imposes artificial light into the wild darkness, emphasizing the deep dark of the surrounding landscape – light by which the darkness grows darker and disillusions the night.

This Process Cinema workshop explored a creative tradition in alternative filmmaking that is improvisational and interactive. Through this process-driven methodology, the screenplay as governing document is replaced by a fluid integration of writing, shooting and editing, not necessarily in that order.This way of working ‘through’ process has a comparative body of work in music, through jazz, in art, through ‘action painting’, in the performative aspects of the sketchbook or through ‘spontaneous prose’ in beat poetry.

This on-site event will see artists Holly Robin and Brendan Lehman turning the lab into a computer programming station with a gaming hub on the patio. Participants interacted with real time game development while artists create interfaces that react to each unique environment.

For this new 45-minute video collage piece, We Claim Anonymity will project out onto Main Street a brand new video and will later “perform” the soundtrack live for listeners. Audience members will be encouraged to participate. Included in the collage is a shortened version of a silent film by Sergei Eisenstein called Strike and footage recently shot along the Moose River in northern Ontario.

N2M2L partnered with Nipissing University’s Aboriginal Initiatives and North Bay Film to bring Alanis Obomsawin’s newest documentary exploring the James Bay Treaty # 9. Audiences were treated to an artist Q & A following the film.

Thanks to everyone who came out to make our fourth annual documentary film festival a huge success. Hosted once again at the historical Captiol Centre theatre, audiences enjoyed three days of programming including screenings, panel discussions, artist talks, receptions and media art presentations. More photos coming soon!

Brendan worked from the N2M2L trailer from Thursday July 17 – 19th in Field, Ontario as a part of the River & Sky Music Festival. He created an interactive video game based on the festival, recording live four channel inputs to fuse the festival’s live music with interactive platforms that allowed for individual experiences for each unique user. Festival goers had a chance to experience their own game from a console outside of the N2M2L trailer on site at River & Sky.

The game featured an “infinite runner” – a character moving through scenes, based on the festival setting, to collect items and generate a score. Game scenes, created by Sudbury-based comic artist Holly Robin (www.therobinhead.com), were generated based on the audio of original tracks recorded on-site by the festival’s booked acts and festival patrons with the help of the Near North Mobile Media Lab. The game was structured so that each music track constituted a “level”. Actions taken by the player (collecting items, jumping, etc.) generated changes in the audio tracks, allowing the player to mix and layer elements of the audio based on how they play and perform in the game. The number of items collected within the level factored into a score. Players were able to input a name, and a high score list was generated for some friendly competition.

As part ofDowntown Gallery Hop Braden and Isabelle will present a five-channel video installation of work created with assistance from N2M2L’s Access Grant to Emerging Artists. Field Trip to Earth is a five-channel practice in navel-gazing for humans. Meant solely for the consumption of curious distant life-forms, this museum of video documentation in which the subjects are captured unknowingly, from afar, is a reminder we are always being watched. The question remains, does the glare of another hold an aura all it’s own?

For the Tenth Anniversary of Ice Follies, Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) is pleased to present, in association with Nipissing University’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts, the 2013 laureate (Visual and Media Arts) of the Governor General’s Awards. Monahan’s on-ice installation will be the latest in a series of installations that he has completed across Europe, America, and Asia. His process involves the removal of the back panel of a donated piano and the attachment of 50-metre piano wires to the soundboard inside. Monahan then stretches these wires high up in the air and across to the shore. In previous cases, Monahan has attached the wires to tall buildings. For Ice Follies 2014, he will attach the wires to the gunwales of the Chief Commanda, which is dry-docked at the government wharf in downtown North Bay. After the installation is complete, he will leave a sound-generating device that will provide an ethereal and aeolian sound experience for our visits to the vastness of frozen Lake Nipissing, from the opening reception on February 15th until mid-March.

Aside from Monahan’s installation, N2M2L will produce installations by regional contemporary-arts group, Aanmitaagzi, and a screening of performance artists from various Latin-American countries. This latter screening event will be held in N2M2L‘s 14-foot trailer, which will be parked out on the ice. This presentation is in support of the annual AluCine Latin American Film Festival in Toronto.

Gordon Monahan:

2013 Laureate, Governor General’s Awards (Visual and Media Arts)

Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Beginning in the late 1970′s, he created sound works using elements of natural forces and the environment, eventually constructing long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996).

Of his work, Monahan has said, “My interest in sound originates from music because my artistic training is in traditional, classical music and pop music. In the last few years I’ve come across an interesting technical phenomenon, and that is to make motors vibrate with audio signals. The motor actually replaces the loud speaker. And I do this by sending audio signals into a large 500-watt amplifier, attaching a small electric motor to the speaker terminals at the amplifier. I’ve hung these electric motors on these long piano strings and that induces the audio signals to vibrate these long wires and you hear the audio signals coming out of the piano.”